Perhaps you haven't read my sermon, "Journey to a Quest for Love." To summarize, I began with what science has to teach me about the world around me, my own planet and the rest of the Universe, and I concluded that I and my fellow-humans are products of a generalized process of evolution -- physical, biological and social -- that has made us free and thus placed us at what I call the moment of Earth, the crucial juncture at which we become free specifically to decide whether or not, and how, evolution on our planet may go on into the future.

To make this decision for myself, I needed to figure out what kind of further evolution is possible for us. I see evolution as an emergence, in which one kind of evolution leads to another as entities of one kind produce a new kind by acting in a new forming relationship.

What is emerging from humanity? I believe that it is that entity which we experience in a variety of ways -- yet with a consistency as to its nature which in me leads to a conviction that it is the same entity -- and which, when we are asked to name it, we tend to call God.

And what is the forming relation in which we make from ourselves this new entity? It is realized in as great a variety of ways as those in which God is experienced. But those ways have in common that the word "love" keeps getting used: love towards another human, love shared in a fellowship, love towards God, love from God, God as love, sometimes love as a state of being or a property of existence. If the word "love" had not been there for me to see, I might not have seen the commonality, the thread through all the activities that help bring God into the world. Or if I had, I would have had to seek out a term to use to express it. But my language had the word waiting for me, and I happily took the opportunity to use it.

There remained, though, the challenge of arriving at a definition that selected from all the meanings of "love" those that applied to the God experience, while leaving out the irrelevant ones, and also drew in some activities, not usually called love, that should be included -- the word "love" is rarely applied, for instance, to meditation, yet meditation can be an important way of reaching God, whereupon God is then experienced as love.

The definition of "love" that I arrived at is

love is consciousness of unity.

To return to the example of sex: recreational sex with another person can be a great fun activity, but it does treat the partner as just that, an other; the kind of sex that can become a sacrament, on the other hand, involves a sense and state of oneness with, a consciousness of unity with, the partner.

I could say that the ways to God are those activities which entail consciousness of unity, but for this concept, so central to my religion, I prefer short words, and call them acts of love.

So this is what I mean by "Acts of Love" in the broad sense.

But to get from knowing what general kind of things to do to bring God into my world, to selecting or recommending specific activities, I need to consider the categories separately. Let me now refer you to other pages which will, as the poem puts it, "count the ways":

personal love ;

friendship and fellowship ;

visionary experiences ;

religious activities (I discuss my own religious practices elsewhere);

spiritual exercises .